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Saturday, October 18, 2008

Genius!!

Julia showed us the latest (3/08) VAV Magasinet at the Richmond Weavers meeting, and Pat got me the English edition of the issue from Canada. (I didn't know there were English editions - I use to get Swedish version with English inserts.)

Anyway, my eyes were glued to this little ad at the back. Does anyone weave like this, without the dreaded back beam? This just takes away a whole lot of heartache for me, to weight down the entire warp chain, instead of having to wind it. I've done this with supplementary warps, (I only have one warp beam), but I love the simplicity of it. AND the modification can be made at a relatively low cost; it's simple enough my man can do it in a few hours, with a bit of coaxing of course. He says our ceiling isn't high enough, but I don't mind having to undo the chains a bit more frequently.

Can anyone enlighten me as to the pros/cons of this method? In particular, I want to know how the warp stays spread out around the bottom beam-thing, along where I marked with the red arrow.

In addition to the links provided by Valerie in the comment section, finally, finally I understand what Kaz was on about way back in Jan 2007 here and here.

That is the vertical version of Peter Collingwood's warp extension. His is horizontal but he says if room is an issue you can do it vertically. I heard him say it on the DVD's that Complex Weavers is selling from his most recent interview. The DVD's are 2 x $18 and well worth the money. NAYY

I don't actually see why you couldn't weave in a way similar to that, as long as you had enough weight. You'd basically be turning it into a horizontally woven warp weighted loom. It would probably depend a lot on _what_ you were weaving though, and I think warp weighted looms give a slightly different feel to the fabric. I'm planning (at some point) to do a sampler piece that is a copy of something I've done on my warp weighted loom - if it turns out that I'm not imagining the difference then I may have to try the weighting thing.

The disadvantage I can see with something like this is that you'd want to weight the warp in sections, and then it gets fairly tedious moving the weights. But with such a long drop you'd get a reasonable run before you had to